Musings: Only (Dis)connect in Japan
[Left] Kinkakuji Temple, Kyoto
While RAJ OZA and his wife, Mangla, were celebrating their four decades of marriage amid the delicate pink and white sakura, President Trump imposed tariffs on well over fifty nations, and then temporarily suspended them. Seen through Japanese eyes, it felt like the end of a world order, creating a rift between close trading partners.
To Mangla and me, this season of trade warmongering signaled the possible end of globalization as we experienced it: the international airline we flew on; the vegan sushi we ate; the faded blue jeans we wore; the catchy J-pop we listened to; the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired hotel where we rested; and the English-Japanese mashup we engaged in. To be sure, the draining of our retirement account contributed to the panic we felt, but there was another feeling of emptiness: what would fill the void?
Assuming Trump’s minions had thought this through, what would replace free trade and the order that governed the interdependent supply chains? Supply chains are but logistical and epistemological passages providing access to goods and culture. For example, decades of interconnectedness have provided other countries with a passage to Japan's automobiles and harmony with nature.
[Right] Cherry blossoms in Tokyo
Here are three more passages from countries I've lived in: passage to India's software services and Karma Yoga; passage to Canada's maple syrup and kindness, eh; passage to America's integrated circuits and aspirational democracy. (Actually, the top export for Canada, India, and America is crude or refined petroleum, but while oil generates trillions of dollars of global economic value, it makes for boring branding.)
[Left] Mangla and Rajesh Oza in front of Daibutusu (the Great Buddha at Kamakura)
What would happen when these passages were blocked by unpredictably high and unreliably higher tariffs?
Like everyone I spoke with, including a friend who had been the CEO of multiple publicly traded companies, I had no answer to the world seemingly falling apart. The fear was that Trump had no vision associated with his signature acts, his nihilist axe. Perhaps MAGA’s endgame was a hollow CODA: Cavalierly Only Disconnect America. Trying to make sense of it all, I recalled E. M. Forster’s Howards End. To the disturbing tune of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which Forster proclaims to be “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man,” I anxiously imagined a disrupted world:
Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall.
Beethoven chose to make all right in the end.
As flabbergasted stockbrokers clamored over whether to go short or go long, all I could hear was the famous symphony’s opening “short-short-short-long” translated to “fate knocking at the door.”
While visiting numerous Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in Tokyo, Kamakura, Hakone, and Kyoto, I put aside the bluster from Washington, D.C. and the hysteria from Wall Street. I was reminded of Hinduism’s samsara, the endless cosmic cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation. Bowing to the deer in Nara Park and subsequently to the Daibutsu—the Great Buddha—I embraced the possibility of harmony.
[Right]Bowing to a deer in Nara Park
I thought back to my doctoral dissertation: it’s not only trade that crosses borders; so do diasporic travelers like my wife and myself; and so do novels like Forster’s, music like Beethoven’s, and ideas like the Buddha’s. Prince Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment has traveled from India (where I was born) to China, Korea, Japan, indeed to the world over, including to the Buddhist Temple in Palo Alto, where I live. So, what does the prince who awoke as the Buddha have to offer me in the middle of potential economic collapse? Freedom from ignorance, craving, rebirth, and suffering.
Maybe it is just Trump’s pause on the tariffs and the double-digit surge of the stock market that has me believing we have averted an apocalypse. Perhaps I am inspired by the Japanese pottery art of kintsugi which conveys the possibility of golden repair. Or maybe it’s just my nature to weather the storm with faith in universal brotherhood and sisterhood. Either way, while in Japan, I believed my family and Mother Earth’s family would recover from this human-created havoc.
Upon returning to California, my wife and I watched the opening ceremony of the World Expo 2025 broadcast by NHK from Osaka. We hummed along with the thousands of attendees singing “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The Expo’s theme is "Designing Future Society for Our Lives" with a subtheme of “Connecting Lives.” Perhaps while developing a theme that might unify more than 150 participating countries, the Japanese had read the epigraph in Howards End: “Only connect!”
Dr. Rajesh C. Oza’s doctoral dissertation is titled Globalization, Diaspora, and Work Transformation. His debut novel, Double Play on the Red Line, will be published this year by Chicago’s Third World Press.
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